Visiting Artist’s Lecture: Emily Mae Smith

MOLLY VANDENBERG

Staff Writer

Emily Mae Smith spoke to Visual Arts and New Media students at the Visiting Artists Lecture on Nov. 9 in McEwen Hall.

Influenced by Art Nouveau and 1960s pop art, her work consists of surreal oil paintings that touch upon the themes of gender, sexuality, eroticism, greek mythology, biblical symbolism, poster art and women’s place throughout art history. There is a touch of satire in her work that creates the sense of ongoing jokes throughout some of them.

Smith received her B.F.A. in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin and her M.F.A. in visual art from Columbia University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Things weren’t always going well for Smith. Before she started to gain success from selling her work, she worked as an artist’s assistant and actually got kicked out of her first studio due to the cut-throat workings of New York real estate.

While she had to work with what she had during this darker time in her career, she managed to better her art. She figured out how to communicate very direct messages with her paintings.

While struggling with some negative feelings about her situation, she was also watching some “extraordinary sexism” happen all around her, so she started putting these feelings into her work in the most direct possible way.

“At the time [my style of work] was not very fashionable. Really messy abstract painting was the ‘it’ thing in 2013. It was everywhere and it was also very male-oriented. I just said, ‘I’m going to make the opposite of that,’” said Smith.

One of her first series,“The Studio,” was inspired by the “The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art” magazine that was published in London from 1893 to 1964. Inspiration for this series also came from Smith’s personal desire for her own studio.

Smith’s adaptation of “The Studio” included some jokes about vegetables and sexuality, as well as desire and gender.

Smith began implementing a broom in a number of her pieces. This broom was originally derived from the cartoon “Fantasia,” but she has since turned it into her own creation. She was working as an artist’s assistant when she came up with the idea. One of her first paintings of this series shows the broom “behaving badly” whilst smoking a cigarette. The broom had become her muse and has been the subject of many of her paintings.

“This is really when I started to find my voice as an artist because the paintings just wrote themselves in my mind,” said Smith.

One of her broom paintings is titled “Still Life” and zooms in on the broom’s face and the images reflecting in the sunglasses. The reflection was like a cultural and gendered lens.

“I thought about how the female perspective is absent as a discourse in Western traditional culture. I started thinking about zooming in to this face as a way to approach painting subjectivity in a different way,” she said.

Things began looking up for Smith after she received a New York Times review and got the chance to be featured in a gallery and gained a studio. More and more opportunities continued to fall into her lap and she managed to become a successful artist in Brooklyn.

According to Fredonia’s website, the Visiting Artists Program gives students “exposure to a variety of art and design professionals from around the country.” There are a number of different lectures throughout every semester that are open to the public.